Life Story Of Siri

We all are familiar with Siri in an iPhone. But do we know enough about this wonderful app. Like every good thing, Siri too have an amazing life story. Let’s have a look at some important points in that story which made Siri the way it is today.

Siri is the acronym for Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface. Siri is regarded as a start point for a future in Artificial Intelligence. It’s basically an intelligent personal assistant available for iOS users. Apple’s iOS, watchOS and tvOS supports Siri. Originally Siri was an iOS application developed by Dag Kittlaus and his team of SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center as an iPhone app. It was a CALO project funded by Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency of United States Defence Wing. Later this stand alone application was acquired by Apple. Acquisition took place on April 28, 2010.On October 11, 2011 Apple released Siri as a part of iOS 5.

The acquisition of Siri soon became a highly strategic business decision by Apple as soon Siri became a craze among Apple users. Siri was introduced as an in built feature for the first time with iPhone 4S running on iOS 5. This new version of Siri mostly had integration with iPhone’s inbuilt apps and few external applications.

When iOS 6 was introduced, Apple made Siri compatible with the iPad. Siri was equipped with more abilities like opening apps for you, tweet for you, and update you with information in different fields. Siri was also integrated with Apple’s map service to help in easy navigation.

The next update was with iOS 7. Siri was equipped with fresh and high quality voices. Siri could access more applications like Voice mail, display tweets for you and access Wikipedia for providing information. “Push to talk” feature was introduced with iOS 7.1 so that you could control when Siri should start listening and when it should stop. Higher quality voices for new languages like Mandarin Chinese, UK English, Australian English and Japanese were added. This version of Siri was integrated into the Carplay feature of Apple, which provides automobile integration for your Apple Maps during navigation.

Siri acquired the ability to listen to the “Hey, Siri” command with the introduction of iOS 8. Before the introduction of this version, you had to click on the home button to activate Siri. But with this update you can easily command to Siri to do things for you, while driving, while cooking or while engaged in any kind of work. You can make Siri set reminders, read mails, tweet for you, make calls, set alarms, do calculations, play music and many more without holding your iPhone in your hand.

Now Apple is integrating Siri into its HomeKit framework for home automation. This revolutionary feature would enable Siri to do tasks like switching off lights, adjusting temperature of Air Conditioner at your command. The updates for Siri do not end here. Even better ones are yet to come. With Siri Apple is gearing up for a new age of Artificial Intelligence.